With this announcement, Oracle is the only major cloud provider to deliver and support a unified cloud native solution across managed cloud services and on-premises software, for public cloud (Oracle Cloud Infrastructure), hybrid cloud and on-premises users, supporting seamless, bi-directional portability of cloud native applications built anywhere on the framework. Since the framework is based on open, CNCF certified, conformant standards it will not lock you in - applications built on the Oracle Cloud Native Framework are portable to any Kubernetes conformant environment – on any cloud or infrastructure

Oracle Cloud Native Framework – What is It?

The Oracle Cloud Native Framework provides a supported solution of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cloud services and Oracle Linux on-premises software based on open, community-driven CNCF projects. These are built on an open, Kubernetes foundation – among the first K8s products released and certified last year. Six new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cloud native services are being announced as part of this solution and build on the existing Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry, and Oracle Container Pipelines services.

Cloud Native at a Crossroads – Amazing Progress

We should all pause and consider how far the cloud native ecosystem has come – evidenced by the scale, excitement, and buzz around the sold-out KubeCon conference this week and the success and strong foundation that Kubernetes has delivered! We are living in a golden age for developers – a literal "First Wave" of cloud native deployment and technology - being shaped by three forces coming together and creating massive potential:

Culture: The DevOps culture has fundamentally changed the way we develop and deploy software and how we work together in application development teams. With almost a decade’s worth of work and metrics to support the methodologies and cultural shifts, it has resulted in many related off-shoots, alternatives, and derivatives including SRE, DevSecOps, AIOps, GitOps, and NoOps (the list will go on no doubt).

Code: Open source and the projects that have been battle tested and spun out of webscale organizations like Netflix, Google, Uber, Facebook, and Twitter have been democratized under the umbrella of organizations like CNCF (Cloud Native Computing Foundation). This grants the same access and opportunities to citizen developers playing or learning at home, as it does to enterprise developers in the largest of orgs.

Cloud: Unprecedented compute, network, and storage are available in today’s cloud – and that power continues to grow with a never-ending explosion in scale, from bare metal to GPUs and beyond. This unlocks new applications for developers in areas such as HPC apps, Big Data, AI, blockchain, and more.

Cloud Native at a Crossroads – Critical Challenges Ahead

Despite all the progress, we are facing new challenges to reach beyond these first wave successes. Many developers and teams are being left behind as the culture changes. Open source offers thousands of new choices and options, which on the surface create more complexity than a closed, proprietary path where everything is pre-decided for the developer. The rush towards a single source cloud model has left many with cloud lock-in issues, resulting in diminished choices and rising costs – the opposite of what open source and cloud are supposed to provide.

Open: truly open, community-driven, and not based on proprietary tech or self-serving OSS extensions

Introducing the Oracle Cloud Native Framework – What’s New?

The Oracle Cloud Native Framework spans public cloud, on-premises, and hybrid cloud deployment models – offering choice and uniquely meeting the broad deployment needs of developers. It includes Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Cloud Native Services and the Oracle Linux Cloud Native Environment. On top of the existing Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Registry, and Oracle Container Pipelines services, a rich set of new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure cloud native services has been announced with services across provisioning, application definition and development, and observability and analysis.

Application Definition and Development

Oracle Functions: A fully managed, highly scalable, on-demand, functions-as-a-service (FaaS) platform, built on enterprise-grade Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and powered by the open source Fn Project. Multi-tenant and container native, Oracle Functions lets developers focus on writing code to meet business needs without having to manage or even address the underlying infrastructure. Users only pay for execution, not for idle time.

Streaming: Enables applications such as supply chain, security, and IoT to collect from many sources and process in real-time. Streaming is a highly available, scalable and multi-tenant platform that makes it easy to collect and manage streaming data.

Provisioning

Resource Manager: A managed Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provisioning service based on industry standard Terraform. Infrastructure-as-code is a fundamental DevOps pattern, and Resource Manager is an indispensable tool to automate configuration and increases productivity by managing infrastructure declaratively.

Observation and Analysis

Monitoring: An integrated service that reports metrics from all resources and services in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Monitoring provides predefined metrics and dashboards, and also supports a service API to obtain a top-down view of the health, performance, and capacity of the system. The monitoring service includes alarms to track these metrics and act when they vary or exceed defined thresholds, helping users meet service level objectives and avoid interruptions.

Notification Service: A scalable service that broadcasts messages to distributed components, such as email and PagerDuty. Users can easily deliver messages about Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to large numbers of subscribers through a publish-subscribe pattern.

Events: Based on the CNCF Cloud Events standard, Events enables users to react to changes in the state of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure resources, both when initiated by the system or by user action. Events can store information to Object Storage, or they can trigger Functions to take actions, Notifications to inform users, or Streaming to update external services.

Use Cases for the Oracle Cloud Native Framework: Inclusive, Sustainable, Open

Inclusive: The Oracle Cloud Native Framework includes both cloud and on-prem, supports modern and traditional applications, supports both dev and ops, can be used by startups and enterprises. As an industry, we need to create more on-ramps to the cloud native freeway – in particular by reaching out to teams and technologies and connecting cloud native to what people know and work on every day. The WebLogic Server Operator for Kubernetes is a great example of just that. It enables existing WebLogic applications to easily integrate into and leverage Kubernetes cluster management.

As another example, the Helidon project for Java creates a microservice architecture and framework for Java apps to move more quickly to cloud native.

Many Oracle Database customers are connecting cloud native applications based on Kubernetes for new web front-ends and AI/big data processing back-ends, and the combination of the Oracle Autonomous Database and OKE creates a new model for self-driving, securing, and repairing cloud native applications. For example, using Kubernetes service broker and service catalog technology, developers can simply connect Autonomous Transaction Processing applications into OKE services on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Sustainable: The Oracle Cloud Native Framework provides a set of managed cloud services and supported on-premises solutions, open and curated, and built on an enterprise grade infrastructure. New open source projects are popping up every day and the rate of change of existing projects like Kubernetes is extraordinary. While the landscape grows, the industry and vendors must face the resultant challenge of complexity as enterprises and teams can only learn, change, and adopt so fast.

A unified framework helps reduce this complexity through curation and support. Managed cloud services are the secret weapon to reduce the administration, training, and learning curve issues enterprises have had to shoulder themselves. While a do-it-yourself approach has been their only choice up to recently, managed cloud services such as OKE give developers a chance to leapfrog into cloud native without a long and arduous learning curve.

A sustainable model – built on an open, enterprise grade infrastructure, gives enterprises a secure, performant platform from which to build real hybrid cloud deployments including these five key hybrid cloud use cases:

Development and DevOps: Dev/test in the cloud, production on-prem

Application Portability and Migration: enables bi-directional cloud native application portability (on-prem to cloud, cloud to on-prem) and lift and shift migrations. The Oracle MySQL Operator for Kubernetes is an extremely popular solution that simplifies portability and integration of MySQL applications into cloud native tooling. It enables creation and management of production-ready MySQL clusters based on a simple declarative configuration format including operational tasks such as database backups and restoring from an existing backup. The MySQL Operator simplifies running MySQL inside Kubernetes and enabling further application portability and migrations.

HA/DR: Disaster recovery or high availability sites in cloud, production on-prem

Workload-Specific Distribution: Choose where you want to run workloads, on-prem or cloud, based on specific workload type (e.g., based on latency, regulation, new vs. legacy)

Intelligent Orchestration: More advanced hybrid use cases require more sophisticated distributed application intelligence and federation – these include cloud bursting and Kubernetes federation

Open: Over the course of the last few years, development teams have typically chosen to embrace a single-source cloud model to move fast and reduce complexity – in other words the quick and easy solution. The price they are paying now is cloud lock in resulting from proprietary services, closed APIs, and non-portable solutions. This is the exact opposite of where we are headed as an industry – fueled by open source, CNCF-based, and community-driven technologies.

An open ecosystem enables not only a hybrid cloud world but a truly multi-cloud world – and that is the vision that drives the Oracle Cloud Native Framework!